A review on software defined network security risks and challenges

Abstract

Software defined network is an emerging network architecture that separates the traditional integrated control logic and data forwarding functionality into different planes, namely the control plane and data forwarding plane. The data plane does an end-to-end data delivery. And the control plane does the actual network traffic forwarding and routing between different network segments. In software defined network the networking infrastructure layer is where the entire networking device, such as switches and routers are connected with the separate controller layer with the help of standard called OpenFlow protocol. The OpenFlow is a standard protocol that allows different vendor devices like juniper, cisco and huawei switches to be connected to the controller. The centralization of the software defined network (SDN) controller makes the network more flexible, manageable and dynamic, such as provisioning of bandwidth, dynamic scale out and scale in compared to the traditional communication network, however, the centralized SDN controller is more vulnerable to security risks such as DDOS and flow rule poisoning attack. In this paper, we will explore the architectures, the principles of software defined network and security risks associated with the centralized SDN controller and possible ways to mitigate these risks.